Christopher S. Baird

This turned out better than I expected. Happy Pi Day!

On the moon, g is 1.625, so according to your logic, pi = 1.27 on the moon. You can't simultaneously choose L = 1 m and T/2 = 1 s. By doing so, you are treating pi as an adjustable parameter. Rather, to get T/2 = 1 s on earth (which is a grandfather clock) and with true pi, you need L = 0.994 m.

Thanks for bringing this to light. For what it's worth, learning to take care of livestock is an important part of education in rural communities, as many of those kids will grow up to be farmers and ranchers. I'm not saying that school vouchers should necessarily pay for it.

A chain link fence with fine, needle like ice crystals growing all over the chain. Morning sun shines the from the other side of the fence.

Seen on this morning’s walk

I'm old enough to remember that. Call me weird but I disliked full-service gas stations and would drive the extra distance to get to a self-service one. I didn't want to have to chat with a stranger just to fill up with gas. (I'm introverted.) Also, I didn't want to feel guilty for not tipping.

That's interesting. Along these lines, years ago I walked past a billboard ad in Germany that stated "Genuine American Pizza" and had a 30-ft tall photo of a pizza covered with whole-kernel corn.

Will laser blasters ever be possible? - Christopher Baird YouTube video by TED-Ed

My TED-Ed video on lasers is finally published, and it already has 121,000 views on YouTube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmO2...

I can confirm it's real. Also, for some reason, the official pronunciation is "water-burger."

On a related note, at my old college they tried to prevent people from touching the large open-air Foucault pendulum and messing it up by posting an official-looking sign that says, "Warning: 10,000 Ohms."

Cool, but it's not diffraction. There are multiple lights beyond the door at different locations, each creating its own beam of light through the crack. It's effectively a pinhole camera. For incoherent visible white light, you need a way smaller slit than that to get noticeable diffraction.

I've been converted to sturdy paper gift bags. It takes three seconds to pop the gift in the bag, and we reuse the bags year after year, which is better for the environment and saves us money.

My kids got out a game they haven't played in a while and forgot a rule.

My daughter: "I'll just do a google search on my phone. This is what AI says-"

Me: "No, don't do that, it will just give you nonsense."

My daughter: "It should be close enough to jog my memory... Oh, it's just nonsense."

My typical response to such people is: I absolutely do teach on Fridays, just not in a classroom. I teach my student research assistants while we do research together and build presentations and papers together, which is way more effective teaching at the advanced level than classroom lectures.

I use the dot multiplication symbol in units for clarity, so the abbreviation for meter-newtons would be [m⋅N], whereas millinewtons is [mN]. The dot can be hard to see sometimes, so it's probably better to stick with newton-meters [N⋅m].

Or we could just call it joules! [N⋅m] = [kg⋅m²/s²] = [J].

To prepare my children for adult life, I impose a candy tax on their Halloween candy. It's a win-win situation! I get to eat some of their candy and they get to prepare to be tax-paying adults. (I seriously do this.)

Bill Gates has his faults but the global vaccine and health initiatives funded by his wealth have saved far more lives than any other rich person's wealth and for that reason I give him a lot of latitude rather than blindly place him in a "billionaire=evil" bucket.

Resistance of a graphite line - the practical where the graph is part of the practical YouTube video by Physics with Simon Poliakoff

This is a fun practical if you haven’t seen it before:

youtu.be/gZK9A_waYP4

#SciTeachUK
#ITeachPhysics

Cool. Today I learned that an automobile and a car are roughly equivalent in terms of weight and efficiency.

I remember as an undergrad going to my first research seminar. The student ended his presentation prematurely, or so it seemed. Someone asked, What were your results? Answer: We don't have any results yet. I've spent two years just trying to get the dumb machine to work properly. It was eye-opening.

Well that was a first. I regularly receive science questions and comments from my readers that I enjoy answering and responding to.

For the first time, an intelligent-sounding person emailed me telling me that my article was wrong because he asked Gemini and Gemini gave a different answer. 🤦

Yes! And I'll add that professors also exist to motivate and inspire students. Articles like this assume that all college students are 100% self-motivated to do all the hard work required to learn. A professor's genuine passion for a subject is contagious in a way that a computer never can be.

I say in class, "The hydrogen really wants to bond with the chlorine - of course it doesn't really want anything because it has no feelings, but the laws of the universe work out just right so that it seems that the hydrogen really wants to do this."

I teach using both words with the understanding that they are not synonyms. A radial vector can be outward pointing or inward pointing, whereas a centripetal vector is always inward pointing (and I avoid the word "centrifugal" like the plaque, in intro classes).

"We see it moving away at just faster than light." This is misleading. The light that you are looking at from a distant galaxy is how the galaxy looked before it was moving away from you at greater than light speed. Light from a source that is moving away at v>c will never reach you.

That's fun. Note that with a strong enough handheld magnet, the diamagnetic response of non-ferromagnetic materials becomes significant, e.g. you can do this same demonstration with wood. So it doesn't necessarily prove that an object has a lot of iron.

youtu.be/gJeqriqRYYE?...

Wenn ChatGPT das Mathe-Paper schreibt 😅 (eigentlich gar kein lustiges Paper: www.ams.org/journals/not...)

Hours of daylight throughout the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Does your university not have travel cards or procurement cards? You know, credit cards with your name on it but tied to the institution's accounts. Ask around because this may be available to you. Also, if requested, universities will often give advances to grad students/post docs for travel.

The entirety of Roy Kerr's paper solving the Einstein equations for a spinning black hole in case anyone wondered what it looks like. In terms of impact per line this paper has to be one of the all-time top 10.

I just got word that the faculty senate of my university is now dissolved and no longer exists, in compliance with the new Texas law. Yikes! I thought my university would somehow find a loophole, or an exemption, but it's official. It's a sad day for shared governance and checks and balances.